Isabelle_Stone
Isabelle Stone
American physicist
Isabelle Stone (October 18, 1868 – 1966) was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society.[1] She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States.
Isabelle Stone | |
|---|---|
Isabelle Stone, from a 1920 yearbook | |
| Born | October 18, 1868 Chicago, Illinois, US |
| Died | 1966 |
| Alma mater | Wellesley College University of Chicago |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Bryn Mawr School Vassar College Sweet Briar College |
| Thesis | On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films (1897) |
Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago.[2] She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890,[1] and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University.[3] Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.[4] Her 1897 thesis, On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films, showed that very thin metal films showed a higher resistivity than the bulk metal.[5]
Stone taught for a year at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. She was a physics instructor at Vassar College from 1898 to 1906,[6] and head of the physics department at Sweet Briar College from 1915 to 1923.[7] From 1908 to 1914, she and her sister Harriet Stone ran a school for American girls in Rome,[1] and later in life they ran another school for girls in Washington, D.C.[8]
Stone was one of two women (out of a total of 836) to attend the first International Congress of Physics in Paris (the other being Marie Curie).[4] In 1899, she was one of forty physicists (and one of two women, the other being Marcia Keith) at the first meeting of the American Physical Society, held at Columbia University.[9]
Stone's research focused on the electrical resistance and other properties of thin films.[1]
- On the electrical resistance of thin films, January 1898, Physical Review, vol. VI, no. 30
- Color in Platinum Films, July 1905, Physical Review (Series I), vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 27–40
- Properties of thin films when deposited in a vacuum[10]
Stone lived with her sister Harriet Stone in Washington, D.C. in her later years. Some of her letters are in the papers of George B. Pegram at Columbia University.[6]
- Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie; Joy Dorothy Harvey (2000). The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L-Z. Vol. 2. Taylor & Francis. p. 1241. ISBN 978-0415920407. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
- Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie (1990). Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press. p. 186. ISBN 978-0262650380. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
- Conable, Charlotte (1977). Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. p. 86. ISBN 0-8014-1098-3.
- Richard Staley (2008). Einstein's Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution. University of Chicago Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0226770574. Retrieved 5 April 2014.
- John M. Ziman (1969). The Physics of Metals, Volume 1. CUP Archive. p. 176. ISBN 978-0521071062. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
- Behrman, Joanna. "American Women in Physics: Their Higher Education and Sites of Practice, 1870-1940". Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
- Sweet Briar College (1920). The Briar Patch. p. 11 – via Internet Archive.
- Creese, Mary R. S. (2000-01-01). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Scarecrow Press. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-585-27684-7.
- Darrow, K. K. (2009-01-22). "n Equals One". Physics Today. 2 (8): 30–32. doi:10.1063/1.3066592. ISSN 0031-9228.
- "Stone, Dr. Isabelle". American Men of Science. New York: The Science Press. 1910. p. 455.
- Melia E. Bonomo (2019). "Isabelle Stone: breaking the glass ceiling with thin films and teaching" essay submitted to APS Forum on the History of Physics, 2019 essay contest